Cisco's Data Center Push Could Have 'Watershed Impact'

data center blade virtualization

"The announcement from Cisco, and the reports that IBM may acquire Sun Microsystems, could be very revolutionary to the marketplace. Obviously we want to participate in that," Douglas said in an interview at Westcon's headquarters in Tarrytown, N.Y., Thursday.

While it's difficult to replace legacy infrastructure in today's corporate IT environment, products such as servers and storage are easy to substitute, which makes Cisco's strategy so compelling, Douglas said while talking about his company's focus for 2009.

While distributors won't initially be part of Cisco's Unified Computing System strategy, Westcon is licking its chops to get a piece of the action, Douglas said.

"We've expanded in software and security and will continue to drive those initiatives. But if the data center is going be recast the way Cisco Systems is going to do it, I think we should be part of that," he said.

Cisco's new strategy can transform the whole data center to customers, added Anthony Daley, executive vice president, the Americas, at Westcon Group. "Now, the data center is part of the complete picture, not just a room. That's the big picture. It really opens [solution providers'] eyes to another business opportunity, a service to [bring to customers] in the new data center," Daley said.

Douglas said Cisco's data center push could end up as historic as when CMOS technology arrived and started to displace mainframes.

"Today, you're talking servers for 99 cents [figuratively] and you can put in 100 of them, all operating as a single image, or as 200 images. Twenty years ago at IBM, I sold two-and-a-half gigabytes of disk storage for $250,000, and we sold 25 MIPS [Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages] of processing for $20 million. We don't see that today," Douglas said. "Cisco has an opportunity, for what they have described, to have a watershed impact on the marketplace."

"One of the things we've really focused on, there's the Cisco business itself, and the complementary vendors essential to any solution," said Duncan Potter, chief marketing officer, at Westcon. "We've taken that core Cisco offering and capabilities to put things around it, and what [VARs] need to know has served us very well in the ways of mobility, unified communications."

The ability for VARs, and Westcon, to put out such wide-ranging technologies as converged Ethernet with security solutions is extremely important, Potter said. "This gives us a real position both with Cisco and with the VARs that is based on things we've already done," he said.